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The Cities We Carry
Essays on Place, Memory, and the Emotional Life of Cities
Speakers
Two questions plagued her for five years, living between Delhi, Venice, and Istanbul: how do we lose what we lose, and why do we love whom we love?
Drawing on her collection of essays Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities (2026), written across 25 years and 13 cities, Ananya Vajpeyi will explore what cities hold for us. The memory and meaning held in street corners and corridors of light; the way personal loss and political trouble have of finding each other in the very same spaces.
Architect Prem Chandavarkar brings his own lifelong reckoning with cities to the table. Between them, the conversation promises to move across continents, disciplines, and the question of what it means to love a place.
The conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Speakers
Ananya Vajpeyi
Ananya Vajpeyi is a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. An intellectual historian, political theorist and writer, she was educated in Delhi, Oxford, and Chicago. Her book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (2012), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, the Crossword Award for Non-Fiction, the Tata First Book Prize for Non-Fiction, and was listed among the Books of the Year by The Guardian and The New Republic.
Apart from her scholarly work, she writes widely for newspapers and journals in India and abroad. She edited AROOP: Journal of Art, Ideas and Poetry from 2019 to 2024. Signature on the Wind, her English translation of a volume of poetry in Hindi by her late father Kailash Vajpeyi has just appeared from Sahitya Akademi (February 2026). She is currently completing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit.
Prem Chandavarkar
Prem Chandavarkar is the Managing Partner of CnT Architects, a legacy practice with a history dating back to being Bengaluru’s first architectural firm.
He is a former Executive Director of Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design & Technology, is an academic advisor and guest faculty at Indian and international colleges of architecture, and is a member of the Advisory Council of The Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, USA.
He likes to introduce himself as an architect who is easily distracted by other subjects and writes lectures, and blogs on architecture, urbanism, philosophy, education, environment, art, spirituality, and cultural studies.
